Monthly Archives: February 2011

The Minos corporation has you by the balls
making you invent for them,
giving protection after you fled Athens,
when you disgraced the house of Erechtheus
by wiping out nephew Talos who really did it all;
invent the saw, the potters wheel
the compass – who suffers? You, – no,
not paying for your skills like lame Hephuestus?
You make bronze bulls for Minos,
play with his wife, indulging her
appetite. Oh technician of Crete
taught by Athene to weld, cast metals,
now doing anything the wealthy want.
You’re the ultimate tool, living on ego.
You didn’t pay much attention to honor, or arete,
oblivious to the Erinnyes that bother most men.

Oh, Daedalus, think of the white bull
doing it to Pasiphae with your device
and all the results, the Minotaur
you so cleverly hid in the labyrinth
which Minos fed with maids from Athens.
(Till Theseus came, but you’re gone by then.)
And you thought you were so good
making dolls and maze dance floors,
watch Ariedne and your son Icarus dance,
he as the partridge, hobbled, rotating
bird sacrifice to the white Moon Goddess.
All the while, CEO Minos, Dorian usurper in the ancient land
of the tripartite shrine, Great Snake Goddess and Boy King,
got you, Daedalus, to ward them off, defiling for him.

It all flows, your life,
bright and cunningly wrought.
(A precursor of Odysseus, and millennia later
of physicists Teller and Von Neumann,
Minos Corporation’s dark creators
of hydrogen bombs and computers.)–
Oh Daedalus, cire-perdue
maker of bronze bulls, and the double Axe,
enabler of patriarchal power,
you slipped away when it got hot,
as a partridge, flying away with Icarus,
hardly noticing the feathers on the water
when you lost him.

You’ve survived in the secret places,
the plunging dark Cretan caves,
the labyrinth under Knossos,
beneath the maze dance floors,
(Now hiding in the impenetrable secure facilities
the SCIF’s of our military establishments)
not at all interested in what’s done
with the clever devices,
oblivious of consequence.